Pioneering new ideas of life and health in the 21st Century. The flagship publication for the most innovative and authoritative writer/speaker/instructor on Understanding Conditioning. While he started out like all his friends wondering how to make exercise harder, his breakthrough idea was making exercise as easy as possible -- and therefore inevitable and unavoidable -- as the only effective lifelong strategy for those activities.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Easy Does It

People fail when everything they do becomes too difficult and impossible to do even the simplest things necessary
to achieve and maintain their optimal health. Eating becomes a chore,
sleeping, bathing, and eventually even breathing. At that point, life
lies in the balance. If things get any worse, that life may no longer
be possible -- but if it gets better, that life is resurrected and
recreated -- and that is the importance of "recreation," and also,
"resurrection." "One must die to the old -- and be reborn in the new"
-- especially when that old is not working but only ensuring one's end.

Still,
letting go of the old, may not be possible for many -- conditioned as
they have been, to always make things more difficult for themselves.
That is what they think is necessary to "improve" -- that they first
have to create the problem in order to motivate themselves to discover a
better way of doing things -- than they always have been done before.
There is no provision in their learning (conditioning), of simply
finding a better way -- freeing one from the addiction of that
conditioning that fails them.In
this very manner, most people are ultimately their greatest victims --
victims at their own hands. Only in rare cases, are a few destroyed at
the hands and capriciousness of others. Even those who are, usually
play a large part in placing themselves at the mercy of others --
whether well-intentioned or not. The most common of these
"relationships," are the familiar toxic codependencies -- of which it
becomes difficult to distinguish which is the victim and which is the
perpetrator.Only
a generation ago was there acute awareness of such vulnerabilities --
as people were more dependent of specific others because they didn't
have access to everybody as easily as the World Wide Web made possible.
It is even difficult for those who were not living then to even imagine
such a world -- now living at the leading edge of communications and
information, as every new generation is born into.So
the challenge of the old, and for every generation, is to constantly
die to the old, and be reborn into the new -- and living only in that
reality, and not the past, or even the future -- but the now, which implies that past and the future, and is the only reality. How one does in that present moment, is the sum total of that life -- and nothing is more real than that.The culprit therefore, is all the distractions and entertainment, that takes one away from that focus and mindfulness, that that is what matters -- and not all those things we often think is so important instead. That is the simplicity of being
-- totally there, in the present moment -- when all things are
possible. And particularly, that is the solving of the problems of our
daily living -- which is both the simple and the grand -- reduced to clarity. Otherwise, there is confusion as to what is the actual and what is the imagined.And that is the way many live their lives -- always in this confusion -- mistaking especially, the complicated for the simple -- and
insisting that things always be complicated and difficult, as though
that was the end purpose of their lives and activities. Eventually,
life just gets totally out of control -- and consumes all their time,
energy and resources. Every little thing, then becomes a big thing, consuming all their time, energy and resources.Yet
despite that, everything simply gets worse, and eventually, hopeless --
at which point death becomes the only thing possible. That existence
is no longer viable -- and capable of continuing, no matter how great the expenditures and effort. So rather than effort being a measure of success, it actually is a better indicator of failure -- because sustainability demands economy and efficiency. Everything that is uneconomical and inefficient must end. We know that in everything we do. But some will persist in their denial for as long as possible -- until that is no longer an option.Then life and choice, is out of their hands, beyond their control. Intelligence is what makes the world simpler and easier -- rather than more complex and difficult. And that makes all things possible.